This section is intended to provide a background to the various embodiments of the technology that are described in this disclosure. The description in this section may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description or claims of this disclosure and is not admitted to be prior art by its mere inclusion in this section.
As the use of mobile wireless devices (in this disclosure also interchangeably referred to as User Equipments (UEs)), such as tablet computers and smart phones, become more ubiquitous, the demands on the limited radio frequency spectrum used by these mobile wireless devices also increases. Sometimes this leads to network congestion in the licensed radio frequency spectrum. In addition, an increased use of high bandwidth applications such as audio and video streaming may increase demands beyond the capability of the available spectrum. This is especially true in high density and high use locations such as for example urban location (e.g., large cities).
Improvements in wireless architectures, hardware design, and processor speed have increased the efficiency of the mobile wireless devices in their use of the available spectrum. However, the ability to transmit a greater number of bits per second per hertz of available bandwidth may be reaching an upper limit with the currently available battery technology.
One possible way of providing additional bandwidth capacity to mobile wireless devices is through the use of an unlicensed spectrum. Many types of mobile wireless devices are capable of communicating via licensed spectrum, such as through a cellular radio network, and via unlicensed spectrum, such as via a Wi-Fi hotspot. Wi-Fi is a common name, coined by the WiFi Alliance, for an Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 set of standards for communicating in unlicensed spectrum including e.g. the 2.4, 3.7 and 5 GHz frequency bands. The set of standards includes the IEEE 802.11a standard, the IEEE 802.11b standard, the 802.11g standard, the 802.11n standard, the 802.11-2012, and the 802.11ac standard. This list is not intended to be limiting. Additional 802.11 standards are also considered to be within the scope of this disclosure. While Wi-Fi is being given as an example of a standard used to communicate via an unlicensed portion of the radio frequency spectrum, additional standards for communicating in a portion of the unlicensed spectrum may also be used, including for instance the IEEE 802.15 family of personal area networks (PAN).
Standards such as WiFi are used to provide WLAN that can be accessed by dual mode devices (i.e. mobile wireless device having dual mode capability) that are also capable of accessing a cellular network standards such as those standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Releases of the 3GPP standards include, but are not limited to, the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the 3GPP LTE Advanced.
Currently, WLAN is generally integrated as a separate access network to the 3GPP evolved packet core (EPC). Existing mobile wireless device based WiFi offload solutions can enable selective switching of flows based on operator or user policies. These solutions typically require the operation and maintenance of a separate WLAN radio access network, thereby generally resulting in greater operational and capital expenditures.
Recently, discussions within 3GPP has begun to focus on a tighter integration (also sometimes known as aggregation) of cellular type networks with WLANs. A tighter integration, or aggregation, of WWANs such as cellular type networks configured to use licensed portions of the radio spectrum, with WLANs designed to use unlicensed portions of the radio spectrum, may substantially improve performance. For example, the integration of 3GPP access network components, such as the eNodeB (eNB) with the WLAN access networks may enable a dual mode capable mobile wireless device to use the licensed and unlicensed portions of the spectrum with minimal impact to the 3GPP core network elements. Such solution may in turn improve the overall user experience without degrading the quality of service (QoS), mobility, security, and/or power management when capacity is expanded to the unlicensed spectrum. Changes to the WLAN access network may be kept to a minimum as well, with preferably no changes to the WLAN air interface.
For example, the U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2013/0083783 A1 is concerned with Multi-RAT Carrier Aggregation for Integrated WWAN and WLAN Operation.